Love Buggers Everything Up

Occasionally I think I’d like to be able to sod off to somewhere obscure whenever I feel like it. I’d like to feel free to roam & not hurt anybody in the process, possibly to pop to the shops & indulge in pointless purchases, such as sparkly wellies or exotic fruit I’ll never eat. Unfortunately, I cannot do these things because I am in a relationship, personally & financially with a man. What is more is that I am in love.

Love buggers everything up.

Love means joy & laughter, & a feeling of co-dependence which is hugely comforting, but love also means one cannot be selfish, one has to compromise & one has to share. One has to be very considerate indeed & often one will hurt, & be hurt.

If I were to find myself, for whatever reason, without my loved one then I should like to think I’d be wise enough not to love again.

I should like to be an individual, an independent soul. That is not to say that looking back on my life I wouldn’t have wanted to find love with someone, just that from this point forward, if I were to end up alone then I should be content to have loved & been loved, but no more. I should like to live my life & no longer feel that I should be searching. I’d like to say that when I met my loved one, my search was not temporarily halted, but it was the end, no matter what the outcome of the love we have. 

Perhaps I should like a companion, where, because when repeated the right amount of times with the right or occasionally the wrong person sex can lead to love, sex is not necessary & therefore there is no danger of love being on the cards at all. Sex could be reserved for flings & wild nights with people I’d have no other connection with or perhaps sex could quite simply be forgotten.

Of course, the love I speak of here is far-removed from the love I have for my children. The love I feel for them is innate, it is how they survive & it is born out of instinct. I feel it in the very pit of my stomach, rooted so deeply that nothing could tear it away. When this love is tested I feel it pulling & I feel a ferocious passion & intense strength that allows me to protect it & to protect them. I have a grip of it as tightly as it has a grip of me & it cannot be broken for anything. This is a love I will always feel & will stay with me until my grave.

Pointedly, though, my children were born out of the emotional bonds I had with others.

The love we feel for a person is, in many ways, rather indulgent. I see it more as a side effect of intelligence than something born of instinct. Our basic instinct is to reproduce, & sometimes I feel as though in some ways ‘ever-lasting love’ is something counter-intuitive. We will always know our children, because they are part of us, but how well do we really know another who is not related to us? Sure, a relationship is good for us in the sense that we can doubly protect & support our children, but it hardly seems so necessary as this instinctual love we have for our offspring, & often can addle a person so much as to have a negative effect on family life. Love for a person, someone you really do not know or have any link or bond with except perhaps that of shared experience over time seems strange.

For me, this is a love that comes from the whole torso. I feel it as an energy that consumes my body & compels me to swathe the other in this energy, in my arms, in my love. It is an unspoken, mutual bond that when tested will not always make you fierce, sometimes it will make you weak & worrisome. It is a gentler love, linking also to our need to feel a connection & this connection is one which can be tugged to & fro by both parties. This is also a love which can be destroyed or discarded. It is a love which can change.

If I were to find myself, for whatever reason, without my loved one then I should like to think I’d be wise enough not to love again, but the flaw in my plan is this:

I am human, & I love.